Fooling America: A talk by Robert Parry

Given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993

Special thanks to Lisa Pease (transcription) and Garby Leon (submission).
Well thank you for coming out tonight. I do want to first thank
FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) for inviting me .
It's always a pleasure to leave Washington and come to the West
Coast.

It's a fascinating aspect of how Washington and Los Angeles interrelate
these days. I'm not sure which city is more used to producing
fantasy than the other, but I always think that LA's fantasy is
often more entertaining.

But there is this tremendous sense of both envy and concern between
Washington and LA, but Washington will often look down at Los
Angeles as a place that produces movies, sometimes like JFK, movies
that were very upsetting to the Washington establishment because
they suggested that there was a cover-up of the murder of the
President back in the 1960s.

But you also find that people in Washington are incredibly attuned
to what's happening out here. I was talking to a journalist friend
of mine the other day who was saying that there was, for Spike
Lee's latest movie, she saw Vice President Quayle in the line
waiting to get into the movie, but he thought it was a Roman spectacular,
Malcolm 10. And then someone else said they saw Clarence Thomas
waiting to get in, but he thought it was an X-rated film. So
Washington is a place that does keep track of what is happening
out here. Of course, I'm not sure that Los Angeles could produce
entertaining shows like the McLaughlin Group, but it does do it's
best.

Tonight I'd like to talk about what I was doing in the 1980's.
I was a reporter for the Associated Press. I started with the
AP back in 1974, and worked briefly in Baltimore and then in Providence,
Rhode Island, where I covered some of the problems of the Democratic
power structure there - Freddy St. Germaine was of course involved
with the banks in a very unsavory way. And eventually I was brought
to Washington for the AP back in 1977 and covered the Carter administration.
And I was examining some of their, what seem like today rather
minor scandals, things like the General Services Administration,
the waste and fraud that was going on there. And in 1980, after
the election, I was assigned to go work on the Special Assignment
team for the Associated Press which was there investigative unit.

In history, AP's investigative team was actually quite impressive.
Sy Hersh had been there, a number of important stories had been
broken out of that investigative unit, which at one time was ten,
fifteen, twenty people. By the time I was there it had shrunk
to about four. I was assigned to do investigations. Other people
were doing things like columns about the State Department or about
politics, and I was really the only investigative reporter so
designated at the AP's Washington Bureau at that time.

But no one told me what to work on. And it struck me one day,
as I was sitting around, that this administration had a thing
about Central America. At the time there had been a number of
atrocities that were occurring, and the four American churchwomen
had been killed. And the explanations coming from this transition
team were quite remarkable. If you remember, Jean Kirkpatrick
suggested in one interview that these weren't really nuns, they
were more political activists, which always struck me as an amazing
suggestion that it's okay to kill political activists. Anyway,
it seemed like a very important area to them, one that might end
up driving much of what they did, at least in terms of foreign
policy and national security issues.

So I began working on it. And that experience, in a way, shaped
what I did for the rest of my time at the AP. And it was also
striking to me that that experience was beyond anything I could
have imagine, as an American citizen, watching. It was a case
of wide- spread killing - political killing - of dissidents, torture,
in the case of women often rape was involved; and this government
was not just supporting it, not just providing the weapons and
the military support, but trying to excuse it, rationalize it
and essentially hide it.

Which is where I sort of came in and I think many people in the
American press corps in Washington came in, and the press corp
in Central America. At the time the press corps was still the
Watergate press corp, if you will. We were fairly aggressive,
we were not inclined to believe what we heard from the government,
and sometimes we were probably obnoxious. But we were doing our
jobs as I think, more or less, as they were supposed to be done.
That is - to act, when necessary, in an adversarial way.

So when we began covering this topic in early 1981, we had some
very brave people in the field in El Salvador particularly and
throughout Central America, and some of them risked their lives
to cover that story. And those of us back in Washington who obviously
were not facing that kind of risk, were trying to get at things.
Initially, and maybe we all sort of forget this, but I remember
one of my first stories about this had to do with how the State
Department was counting up the dead in El Salvador and who they
were blaming. At that time the position was that the guerrillas
were killing more than half of the people dying in the political
violence and that the government was less responsible.

So I went over to the State Department to review their methodology,
and what I found was that the way they got their figures was that
they took the total number of people who had presumably died within
a period of a month or so, and then each time the guerrillas would
claim on a radio broadcast that they had killed some soldiers,
if there was a battle going on and they said "We killed ten
soldiers" and then the battle kept going on and it was twenty,
and then it was fifty, and then another one of their stations
would say fifty, what the State Department did was they added
up all the numbers. And so they were able to create these false
figures to suggest that the government that the Unites States
was supporting was not as culpable as the human rights groups
and particularly the Catholic church in ES were saying.

It began a pattern of deception from the very beginning. Even
when there was something horrible happening in those countries.
Even when hundreds, thousands of human beings were being taken
out and killed, the role of the US. government became to hide
it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn't that serious, and
to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise. And the main targets
of that were the reporters in the field, the human rights groups,
and to a degree, those of us in Washington who were trying to
examine the policies to figure out what was really happening and
what was behind this. I remember again after the new administration
came in and of course Secretary Haig made the remarkable comment
that the four churchwomen were perhaps running a road block, which
is how they'd gotten killed. And even people in the State Department
who at that time were investigating this fairly honestly - they
had not yet been purged - were shocked that the Secretary would
say such a thing because they knew what the circumstances were
even then. They knew that they'd been stopped, they knew that
they'd been sexually assaulted, and shot at close range. None
of that, of course, fit the image of running a road block, and
exchange of fire.

But the reality became the greatest threat, even at that stage,
to what the new administration wanted to accomplish, and what
they wanted to accomplish was I think something they felt strongly
about ideologically which was their view that the communists were
on the march, that the Soviets were an expanding power, that you
had to stop every left wing movement in its tracks and reverse
it. And they were following of course the theory that Jean Kirkpatrick
had devised that the totalitarian states never reverse and change
into democratic states, only authoritarian ones do, which as we
know now is perhaps one of THE most inaccurate political theories.
It's best if you're having a political theory, not to have it
disproven so quickly, you know it might be best if you would,
maybe fifty years from now you wouldn't really know as much.
But Jean Kirkpatricks's was disproven very quickly but it was
still the driving force behind the administration's approach to
a number of these conflicts, and their justifications for going
ahead and trying to conduct what became known later as the Reagan
Doctrine which was to sponsor revolutionary operations or what
am I saying, counterrevolutionary operations in many cases in
various parts of the world and in the Third World in particular.

In ES of course, which was my first focus and the first focus
of this policy, it was to protect a very brutal government which
was at that time killing literally from a thousand to two thousand
people a month. These were political murders; they were done
in the most offensive fashion. I think any American, any average
American, would have been shocked and would have opposed what
his government was doing. So it became very important to keep
that secret, or to minimize it, or rationalize it or somehow sanitize
it.

So what we saw, even at that early stage, was the combat that
was developing and the combat in terms of the domestic situation
in Washington was how do you stop the press from telling that
story. And much of what the Reagan administration developed were
techniques to keep those kinds of stories out of the news media.

In some cases, as we saw later, in late 1981 of course there was,
what is now fairly well known, the massacre in El Mazote. And
this was a case where the first American trained battalion was
sent out over Christmas time in 1981 into rebel controlled territory
and it swept through this territory and killed everybody, everyone
they could find - including the children. When two American reporters,
Ray Bonner and Alma Jimapareta (?), went to the scene of this
atrocity in January of 1982, they were able to see some of what
was left behind and they interviewed witnesses who had survived,
and came out with stories describing what they had found. This
was of course extremely upsetting to the Reagan administration,
which at that time was about to certify that the Salvadoran military
was showing respect for human rights, and that was necessary to
get further funding and weapons for the Salvadoran military.

And I was at those hearings which occurred afterwards, on the
hill, and when Tom Enders who was then Assistant Secretary Of
State for Inter-American affairs gave his description of how the
State Department had investigated this and had found really nothing
had happened or that they had found no evidence of any mass killing,
and they argued with great cleverness that the last census had
not shown even that many people in El Mazote - there were not
the 800 or so who were alleged to have been killed - only 200
had lived there to begin with, and many still lived there, he
said. Of course it wasn't true, but it was, I guess in their
view, necessary - it was necessary to conceal what was going
on. And, it became necessary then, to also discredit the journalists,
so Raymond Bonner, and Alma and others, who were not accepting
this story, had to be made to seem to be liars. They had to be
destroyed. And the administration began developing their techniques,
which they always were very good at - they were extremely good
at public relations, that's what's they had - many of them had
come from - the President himself had been an advertising figure
for General Electric - and they were very adept at how to present
things in the most favorable way for them.

But what we began to see was something that was unusual I think
even for Washington - certainly it was unusual in my experience
- a very nasty, often ad hominem attack on the journalists who
were not playing along. And the case of Bonner was important because
he worked for the New York Times, and the New York Times was one
of those bastions of American journalism - this was not some small
paper, it was not some insignificant news figure. So there began
an effort to discredit him and the Wall Street editorial page
was brought into play, Accuracy In Media was brought into play,
he was attacked routinely by the State Department and White House
spokespeople, there were efforts to paint him as some kind of
a communist sympathizer, the charge would go around that he was
worth a full division for the FMLN - the Salvadoran guerrillas
- he was treated as an enemy - someone who was anti-American,
in effect. And sadly, it worked. I was in ES in October of '82,
I was down there to interview Roberto Dobesan, who was head of
the death squads, and I was with a conservative activist, and
after that interview we had lunch with the head of the political-military
affairs office at the Embassy and the officer was then head of
the military group, and on the way back to the hotel, they were
boasting about how they had "gotten" Ray Bonner. "We
finally got that Son-of-a-Bitch," they said, and at that
time his removal had not yet been announced, so it was very interesting
to hear that they knew what was about to happen, and he was, in
fact, removed by early 1983, and then he was sort of shunted aside
at the New York Times and eventually left.

So the message was quite clearly made apparent to those of us
working on this topic that when you tried to tell the American
people what was happening, you put your career at risk, which
may not seem like a lot to some people, but you know, reporters
are like everybody else I guess - they have mortgages and families
and so forth and they don't really want to lose their jobs - I
mean it's not something they aspire to. And the idea of success
is to keep one of these jobs and there are a lot of interesting
perks that go with it, a certain amount of esteem, you know, as
well as you get paid pretty well. Those jobs in Washington -
you can often be making six figures at some of the major publications,
so it's not something you readily or easily throw away, from that
working level.

But what happened in and around that same time frame, was the
development, secretly, of another part of the Central America
story, which was, of course, the covert war in Nicaragua. And
William Casey and Ronald Reagan began putting this operation together,
and it involved building up this paramilitary group called the
contras, and they were supposed to be seen as an indigenous fighting
force, the American role was supposed to be minimized or hidden,
again, and that was how it was going to be sold to the American
people. It was a classic covert operation, and then it was a
legal one at that time - it had been authorized under the finding
provisions of the National Security Act. But there were problems
with this war from very early on, and one of the problems was
that the Contra's weren't very GOOD at fighting - they would go
into some villages in Northern Nicaragua and commit atrocities,
which began filtering back also to Washington. Congress began
hearing about THEM lining up people in villages and killing them.
But it wasn't a very effective group in terms of like taking
territory. And there was one story which I did later but goes
back to this time, when the CIA, in 1982, prepared a plan - it
was written by the head of military operations, named Rudy Enders,
and Mr. Enders had this timetable, and it talked about how the
Contras were going to grow at a certain rate and where they'd
be at a certain date and they had them marching into Managua by
the end of 1983 - and so this was the plan. The plan was to, well,
officially even to Congress the White House was saying we have
no intention of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua - we're
simply trying to interdict weapons going to El Salvador. In their
own files at CIA, the policy file for the Contra war contained
this timetable to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. So this
was their plan - except that it wasn't working. And so by early
'83, it became clear even to people at CIA that the Contras weren't
what they hoped they'd be cracked up to be, and they ended up
looking at this and saying we're going to have to do some different
things.

Part of this problem though was still that, the longer this thing
dragged out, the harder it was to keep all these secrets - plus
the Contras were still going out and killing people left and right.
So Bill Casey was stuck with a bit of a problem. And he approached
it - as he was a very - Bill Casey is often, I think, misperceived
- he was a very smart man, and he was extremely committed ideologically
to what he was doing, and he was a person who believed in making
things happen - whatever the rules might be, or whatever the red
tape might be. And so he sat down and developed some strategies
in 1983 on what to do. One thing is they would need more time
to train the Contras - they weren't going to work the way they
were going. Secondly, they had to create the impression the Contras
were better than they were, so people wouldn't get tired of supporting
them in Congress. So they decided the CIA would have to start
sending in its OWN people, its own specially-trained Latino assets
to begin doing attacks which the Contras could then claim credit
for, like blowing up Corinto where they blew up this oil depot
in the little town of Corinto on the coast, they sabotaged some
oil pipeline in Porto San Dino, and these were all being done
now by the CIA except that after they'd be done the agency guys
would call up the Contra spokesmen, in this case often Edgar Chimorro,
and they'd get them out of bed and say, "Now you're going
to put a news release out saying that you guys have done this."
Now the reason of course for that was to create the impression
in the United States, to fool the American public and the Congress,
to make the American public think the Contras were really quite
effective - that they were now running sea assaults on Nicaragua
- pretty sophisticated stuff for a paramilitary force.

And Casey had some other ideas. He also began to put together
what became known later as the Psychological Operations Manual
or the Assassination Manual, and he authorized that in the Summer
of 1983, to be prepared - plus they prepared another little booklet
on how if you're a Nicaraguan how you sabotage your own government
- it was a delightful comic book which I later wrote about at
AP - and it showed how you'd start off with, you know, calling
in sick was one of the strategies to sabotage, and you'd build
up to putting sponges in the toilet to make them back up, as if
any of these things work in Nicaragua to begin with, and then
they taught you how to make your own malatov cocktails, it was
sort of - you graduated - you moved up in your sabotage - and
they'd take these little comic books and the Contras were supposed
to leave them behind wherever they'd go, so the people could then
start calling in sick.

So that was one of his ideas. The other one was to do this book
- this very sophisticated book in many ways. It made reference
to ancient scholars, and how you gave speeches, but the most interesting
part was that there was a section about how the Contras should
use 'selective use of violence' to 'neutralize civilian targets'
that is civilian officials, judges, people of that sort. And
the idea was, apparently, that you would kill these people or
at least, you know, incapacitate them somehow, but what was the
most remarkable thing about THAT point was that, when this was
finally uncovered when I did a piece on this a year later or so,
the CIA then argued, "Well, you don't understand. We were
trying to get the contras to be SELECTIVE in their violence against
civilians, not indiscriminate." And that became actually
the defense that was used by the CIA to explain why they were
running this booklet.

But anyway, these things were things that Casey put together in
the summer of '83 but he had OTHER plans, which is one section
- one of the sections of my book deals with this most remarkable
operation that he came up with at that time which is called the
Public Diplomacy Apparatus. And what the Public Diplomacy Apparatus
did was to make more systematic, to better staff, better finance
this campaign to shape the reality that the American public would
see. They had a phrase for it inside the administration. It
was called 'perception management' and, with US. taxpayers dollars,
they then went out and set up offices, mostly at the State Department
- there was this Office of Public Diplomacy' for Latin America
- but secretly it was being run out of the National Security Council
staff. And the person who was overseeing it was a man named Walter
Raymond. And Mr. Raymond had been a thirty- year veteran of
the Central Intelligence Agency and was THE top propaganda expert
for the agency in the world. He shipped it over to essentially
run similar programs aimed at the American public. And overseeing
all of this was the Director of Central Intelligence, William
Casey.

The documentation on this now is extremely strong and clear, that
even on matters of personnel, as well as on matters of general
strategy, Casey would be given reports, asked to provide assistance,
he would help or his people would help arrange bringing in people
to staff this office.

They even turned to psychological warfare experts from Fort Bragg,
who were brought up to handle the cable traffic coming in from
Central America. And, as they say in their own documents, the
purpose of these psychological warfare specialists was to identify
exploitable themes that could be used against - with the American
public - to excite the American public to be more and more angry
about what was happening in Central America.

The documentation is also clear that the idea was to find our
'hot buttons' and to see what - how they could turn, twist, spin
certain information to appeal to various special groups. They'd
reached the point, and this was really being directed by the CIA,
of breaking down the American people into subgroups, and there
were people that they thought might be, for instance the press
- they developed the themes relating to freedom of the press in
La Prensa, which was the newspaper in Nicaragua, which was opposed
to the Sandinistas. They targeted Jewish Americans - they had
a special program to attack the Sandinistas or to paint them as
anti- Semitic, which of course is one of the most, to my view,
one of the most heinous things a person or any group could be.
But, the idea in Nicaragua was to create this image, and then
use it to build support among Jewish Americans for the Contras.

They did run into a bit of a problem with this, when they first
devised it, which was that, they had not yet purged the US.
Embassy of honest foreign service officers, so when they were
preparing this, the Embassy, Ambassador Cranton (?? couldn't hear
the name), sent up a cable - couple of cables - they were classified
and I was later able to get ahold of them - which said it isn't
true! That the Sandinistas are a matter of many things that are
nasty and bad, but they're not anti-Semitic, and he said there
was no verifiable ground upon which to make this charge. So what
the White House did was they kept that classified and went ahead
with the charge anyway. It was just too good a theme.

They also developed this - what they called the 'feet people'
theme. This was one that was based on Richard Worthlund's polling
data. Richard Worthlund who was this sort of legendary, conservative
polling strategist did polling of the American people - they had
special groups of people to sample these things with, and they'd
found out that most of the themes about the communist menace in
Central America left people cold. They didn't really take it that
seriously - it just didn't hit the hot buttons right. But they
found that one hot button that really, they could really use,
was this idea of the Hispanic immigrants flooding into the United
States. So they developed, what they called, the 'feet people'
argument, which was that unless we stopped the communists in Nicaragua
and San Salvador, 10% - they came up with that figure somewhere
- 10% of all the people in Central America and Mexico will flood
the United States.

Now, I suppose at this point already - and this was about '83-84
- we were sort of losing any touch with reality in Washington
after we had been undergoing this stuff, but, if anyone had sat
down and really said 'okay, now does this make any sense?', you
were probably left with this opinion I think, which is that the
massive flows of immigrants at that time were coming from El Salvador
and Guatemala and of course, from Mexico - which was mostly economic
- and in Guatemala and El Salvador it was that there were conservative
governments in place, and at that time the flow from Nicaragua
wasn't very great at all, and there was no 10% of the Nicaraguan
people having fled, so that wasn't happening. There had been
some flow of the wealthier Nicaraguans immediately after the revolution
around 1979, but, it was not until later - much later actually
- '85-85, actually '87-88, when the flow of Nicaraguans increased
because as part of our strategy we were trying to destroy their
economy. And after we destroyed their economy, people being people,
they left - or a lot of them left.

But still, the feet people argument was considered very good because
it played to the xenophobia of America, and it gave some political
clout to Reagan in making this case, and he was able to use it
with particular effect with border state congressmen and senators
who felt politically vulnerable if their had been a sudden surge
of refugees across the border.

So we had in place by this '83-84 timeframe, this Public Diplomacy
office. And what it did was escalate the pressure on the journalists
who were left, who were still trying to look at this in a fairly
honest way and tell the American people what they could find out.
You had cases, for instance at National Public Radio, where,
in sort of a classic example of this, the Public Diplomacy team
from State began harassing National Public Radio for what they
considered reporting that was not supportive of the American position
enough. And finally, NPR agreed to have a sit-down with Otto
Reich - who was head of that office - and one of his deputies,
and they were particularly irate about a story that NPR had run
about a massacre of some coffee pickers in Nicaragua - and the
story was more about their funeral, and how this had really destroyed
this little village in Nicaragua, having lost a number of the
men in the town - and the contras had done it so it didn't look
to good, and Otto Reich was furious and he said 'We are monitoring
NPR. We have a special consultant that measures how much time
is spent on things that are pro-Contra and anti-Contra and we
find you too anti-Contra and you'd better change.'

Now, the kind of effect that has is often subtle. In the case
of NPR, one thing that happened was that the foreign editor, named
Paul Allen, saw his next evaluation be marked down, and the use
of this story was cited as one of the reasons for his being marked
down and he felt that he had no choice but to leave NPR and he
left journalism altogether. These were the kind of prices that
people were starting to pay, all across Washington. The message
was quite clear both in the region and in Washington that you
were not going to do any career advancement if you insisted on
pushing these stories. The White House is going to make it very,
very painful for your editors by harassing them and yelling at
them; having letters sent; going to your news executives - going
way above even your bureau chiefs sometimes - to put the pressure
on, to make sure if these stories were done they were done only
in the most tepid ways. And there also was, in an underreported
side of this, there were these independent organizations, who
were acting as sort of the Wurlitzer organ effect for the White
House attacks. Probably the most effective one from their side
was Accuracy In Media, which we find out, from looking at their
internal documents - the White House internal documents, was actually
being funded out of the White House. There was - in one case
we have because we have the records, the White House organized
wealthy businessmen, particularly those from the news media, from
the conservative news media, to come into the White House to the
situation room where Charlie Wick, who was then head of USIA,
pitched them to contribute a total of $200,000 to be used for
public diplomacy and the money is then directed to Accuracy In
Media and to Freedom House and a couple of other organizations
which then support the White House in its positions, and make
the argument that the White House is doing the right thing and
that these reporters who are getting in the way must be Sandinista
sympathizers or must not be very patriotic or whatever we were
supposed to be at the time.

So you had this effect of what seemed to be independent organizations
raising their voice, but, the more we kept finding out, the more
we found at that these weren't independent organizations at all.
These were adjuncts of a White House/CIA program that had at
its very heart the idea of how we reported the news in Washington
and how the American people perceived what was going on in Central
America. I'm not sure this has ever happened before - I can't
think of it, but it was a remarkable change in the way that the
government, as I guess Ross Perot might say, was coming "at"
the people rather than, you know, being "of" the people.

The overall effect as this continued over time was cumulative.
Those of us in the press who continued - who were not smart enough
to seek cover, found our work more and more being discredited,
and us personally being attacked, because the game really became
how do you destroy the investigator. And whether it be America's
watch, which was finding that the Contras were engaged in human
rights violations as well as the Sandinistas (I should say), or
if it were the Catholic Church in El Salvador reporting upon the
atrocities there, or it was some journalist finding out about
the deceptions in Washington, the best way to deal with that was
to discredit the people who were doing the investigation. If
you made THEM look like they were unpatriotic, wrongheaded, somehow
subversive, the overall effect was to, first of all make it harder
for them to do their job, and secondly when they did their job,
people would tend not to believe it. So it worked, basically.

So, as we get into the mid-80's, we're now in a situation where
it's getting touchier and touchier to do these stories, but Congress,
because of the mining problems and because of the bad publicity
that followed, the disclosure that the CIA was actually doing
many of these things which the Contras had been claiming credit
for, when that was exposed in 1984 - accidentally exposed by Barry
Goldwater on the floor of the Senate - what happened on that case
was that Goldwater had gotten drunk and had gone down to the Senate
and started talking about how the US. was mining the harbors
of Nicaragua. And Rob Simmons, who was then staff director for
the Senate Intelligence Committee rushed onto the floor to grab
this slightly drunken Senator and tell him that he wasn't supposed
to say that and they - it was literally expunged from the Congressional
Record, even though - this was before C- Span so you couldn't
record it - it was expunged from the Congressional Record but
a very diligent reporter, David Rodgers for the Wall Street Journal,
happened to be in the press gallery and wrote it down so it ran
in the Wall Street Journal and it got sort of out, and that contributed
mightily to the problems that they had in continuing the war.
So Congress stopped the funding for the Contras.

Immediately, and actually even before because they knew there
was going to be a problem, the White House had this backup plan,
and it was, of course, to have Ollie North become the point man.
So North becomes, secretly, the point man. He is also being
secretly supported by the CIA, and by the NSA, and by other US.
intelligence services. That comes out much later. But Ollie
North is now the man who is supposedly running everything but
that's all secret too, at least from the American people. And
he's arranging to get weapons and raise money, and they're doing
their various things they did with Saudi Arabia and so forth,
to get the money, and so we end up with a lot of us in Washington
really sort of knowing about this. This isn't like, all that
secret, you know. I'd met Ollie North in '83 and he was actually
a source for many journalists because he would, as part of the
deal he would tell you some sexy stuff about the Achilles Laurel
or something, but you protect your source, so you wouldn't really
write about him.

But I was writing about him. And by the summer of 85 - by June
of 85, I did the first story about Oliver North. And it was a
very tepid story, I must say, looking back at it. I had gone
to the White House with it and they had flatly denied it. They
said it was completely wrong, completely opposite from the truth
- and I at that point had still not caught on to how dishonest
these people had gotten. So I sort of softened it, but I still
put it out - we had this story out for AP about Ollie North,
and how he was running this Contra support operation, and how
the White House was saying it wasn't happening, and that led eventually
over that summer to a few other stories appearing, and of course
it was all denied and the pressure on the journalists was so intense
that the other news organizations backed away - the New York Times
backed away, the Washington Post backed away, and it was left
strangely to the AP and to the Miami Herald which was also following
it with Al Charty's work to pursue this story - and really the
story of the decade, but no one wanted it. It was an amazing
story - it was a story about a really remarkable character, with
a remarkable support cast, I mean, you know it was better than
Watergate in that sense - I mean, you had Fawn Hall as opposed
to Martha Mitchell, I mean this was a much better story! You had
this secret war being fought, you had the government lying through
its teeth every time it turned around, but no one wanted the story.
The price had gotten too high.

So as much as I would like to say, like I was really some sort
of journalistic genius who'd figured this all out, it didn't require
that much. It just required sort of following the leads. They
were all over the place. But we'd learned to sort of shield our
eyes from the leads in Washington. And as we're doing this -
I was now working with Brian Barger who we had brought on at AP
- to help on this story, and we did the Contra-drug story in December
of 1985, which was really well received around town [he said sarcastically],
and we then proceeded to follow the North network into early '86
and we wrote the first story that there'd actually been a federal
investigation in Miami, of what we knew as the North network.
It had been suppressed because you weren't supposed to investigate
this because it wasn't happening anyway, and the US. attorney
who make the mistake of trying to investigate this, or the assistant
US. attorney ended up in Thailand, working on some heroin case,
and the investigation went literally nowhere.

So this was what was happening by the Summer of '86, when Barger
and I finally did a story - we had 24 sources by this point -
it was getting silly, you know? You know, it wasn't like two sources,
or three sources, we were up to 24, and some of them named, and
we did this story in June of '86 where we laid a lot of it out
- we didn't have all of it, I'll grant - we didn't know about
Secord's flights, but we had Rob Owen, and we had Jack Singlaub,
and we had how the intermediaries were moving the weapons and
so forth. So we get to this point, and we put this story out,
and finally Congress - which had been very afraid of touching
this - the democrats were extremely timid - finally Lee Hamilton,
who was then Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee takes
our little story with the rest of the Intelligence Committee over
to the White House and they sit down with Ollie North and they
say, "Colonel North - we have this story that says you're
doing these things which are kind of illegal, uh, what about it?"
He said, "It's not true," they said "Thank you,"
and they went back to Capitol Hill. And I get a call from one
of Hamilton's aides, and he told me, he said - I'll never forget
this, because it was probably my worst moment in the whole Iran
Contra Scandal - I get this call from a Democratic aide who tells
me that Lee Hamilton has looked into my story, and he had a choice
between believing these honorable men at the White House or my
sources and it wasn't a close call.

And so, at that point, we were, sort of, done. They could have
- as Ross Perot might say - they could have stuck a fork in us.
Barger was stuck on the overnight at AP and was sort of pushed
out of the company - he left. I was basically told, more or less,
well, you know, take your medicine like a man, you got it wrong,
you know, and we were wrapping up our investigation - it was over.
During that summer we tried to get a longer version of this into
ANY publication, virtually none would take it. NONE would take
it - I mean, we even went to Rolling Stone and THEY turned us
down.

So that's where we were. This phony, dishonest, false reality
had won out. And the reality had lost out, and anyone who was
crazy enough to actually believe in the reality was a real loser
in Washington.

And then, as it all looked like it was pretty much over, one of
the last planes of Ollie North's little rag-tag airforce, was
chugging along over Nicaragua on October 5th, 1986, and just because
history is like this - history is kind of, you know, it's quirky
sometimes - there was this teenager, draftee, never filed a SAM
missile in his life, didn't even know how to fire it exactly,
but he described after the fact how he sort of aimed it at this
plane that was sort of lumbering along through the sky, and it
went off! The SAM missile went off, and it went right at the plane,
which really amazed this kid. They say it was Soviet made - I
mean, what would you have thought? So the missile goes right at
the plane and hits it right under one of the wings and the plane
starts spiraling out of control. And another little quirk of
history is that - most of the guys were kind of macho on board,
and they didn't wear parachutes, but Eugene Hasenfus had just
gotten a parachute sent to him by one of his relatives, and because
he had the door open to start kicking out these weapons to the
Contras, even though the plane spiraled out of control he could
crawl to the door and pushed himself away from the plane and parachuted
down through the Sandinistas.

And so, there was literally a smoking fuselage on the ground in
Nicaragua, and the press corps in Washington suddenly said, 'oh
gee! Maybe we HAD missed something after all.' But even then the
White House initially - this was - it was an interesting meeting.
October 7th, at the NSC - they were in kind of a panic. Ollie
was out of the country working on the Iran project, so Elliot
Abrams was chairing this meeting, and they were trying to figure
out what to do - what was their story going to be. Later on I
talked to one of the participants at this meeting and I said,
"Gee, what did you guys think you were up to? Did you think
you shouldn't just maybe fess up at this point?" He said
"No. We had been so successful in managing the information,
we, you know, just thought we could just do ANYTHING!" So
the anything they did was that they just started lying again!
And they put out - and it wasn't just from the State Department
anymore, it was from the President of the United States, the Vice
President of the United States, and virtually every senior official
in the position to do anything about this, came out and said there
is no US. government connection to this flight. And Elliot
even sort of came up with this neat idea [sound lost for a moment]
- I know Singlaub pretty well and I happened to put a call in,
and he hadn't been told he was supposed to take the fall - they
hadn't gotten around to telling him that. So when he flies back
from Asia he lands, and he comes down off the plane and all these
reporters are up to him saying, The New York Times has just run
this story based on a senior official saying it was your plane
and he said, "I had nothing to do with that plane!"
So later on he told me that he have taken the fall if he'd only
known that he was supposed to take the fall, but they hadn't TOLD
him he was supposed to take the fall, so, crazy enough, he told
the truth.

So they were still looking for someone to take the blame on this,
and then a very enterprising freelancer, an American journalist,
went into the Salvadoran telephone office, and since everything's
for sale down there, he bought the phone records for the safe
house. They hadn't thought to, you know, take care of the phone
records. And so he buys these phone records and, my goodness,
there are all these calls to the White House, and to Ollie North's
personal line, as well as by the way to the Vice President's office
because Felix Rodriguez who was running the drops was calling
virtually daily - well maybe, certainly weekly - the Vice President's
office to talk to then George Bush's national security advisor
Donald Greg. So they had to come up with some new stories again.
And these stories kept shifting.

But what was incredible about the whole thing was the arrogance
that pervaded the White House at this point. They really thought
they could control how everybody in this country understood the
facts. They could create the reality, and the press would go
along with it, and through the press the American people would
either be deceived or so confused that they wouldn't be able to
do anything about it anyway. The perception management wasn't
going to give up.

But that began to cause problems when the next shoe falls, which
is the disclosure of the Iran initiative in early November of
'86, and that is also a problem legally, because what they know
inside the White House which we don't know yet, is that, in 1985
the President had authorized the first shipment of missiles to
Iran through Israel without proper authorization. He had not
signed a finding; he was in violation of a felony which is called
the Arms Export Control Act.

So they had to cover THAT up. And what we saw was the next remarkable
stage of this. And probably this is what changed a lot of how
I saw journalism. Obviously I'd not been really too thrilled
by what I was seeing up to this point, but the next phase was
even more unbelievable. And the next phase is the scandal was
broken - there are three parts to it basically: there's the illegal
shipments of weapons to the Contras in defiance of the law, the
Boland Amendment; there is the problem of the Arms Export Control
Act, which President Reagan was violating back in '85; and of
course there's what became the focus - the crossover - the use
of residuals from the arms sales in Iran for the Contras - the
so-called 'diversion' which many people feel was indeed a diversion
of the public at least. So you had these three elements. The
White House chose to make a stand on the latter one - the diversion,
and they proceeded to lie about the other two. They put out false
chronologies on Iran to show that the President did not know about
the '85 shipment. They insisted - even as Vice President Bush
insisted until December of '86 that he had no idea there was a
Contra operation going on - even though it had been much of the
press, he just hadn't bothered to read it.

So you had this decision to sort of deny straightforwardly, possibly
accurately that the President did or did not know about the diversion
- they said he didn't. And that became the focus for the press
and for the congress as the investigation gears up, which is very
bad enough because these other questions are very important.
Was the President involved in a felony under the Arms Export Control
Act? Was he involved possibly in another type of crime by defying
a law which he signed into law - the Boland Amendment? Can the
President just unilaterally conduct war using third country funding?
All of these are very important questions to our democracy.

But the focus was on the diversion. And on that they felt they
could contain it as long as John Poindexter said the buck stopped
here, which of course he would do. However, what we began to
see very quickly in Washington was a - almost a collaboration
at this point to contain the scandal. Obviously the White House
and the Republicans had a very strong interest in containing this
scandal; they were politically in hot water. But the Democrats,
and the press, were also inclined to contain the scandal. As
the phrase went - nobody wanted another Watergate. The people
may have wanted another Watergate - but that was the view in Washington
- nobody wants other Watergate. And at this point, my last story
for AP - AP and I had really had some struggles because although
they were in a way happy with my work, but in a way I put them
in some very tough spots, and they had not always been the best,
but I must say they did put out most of our stories, eventually,
and they did the most, of any news organization, but - my last
story for them in February of '87 was - we jumped at one of the
last firebreaks. We brought the story into the CIA. And I reported
that the CIA had assisted North's operation, despite their denials;
that North was using National Security Agency highly-sensitive
secret cryptology equipment and had been passing it out like candy
to all the people who were working with him - they all had these
KL-43's as they were called which could send these secret messages
back and forth, and so we'd broken that barrier. We'd broken
into the CIA.

And then I went to Newsweek. Maybe a mistake, I guess, in retrospect,
but I went to Newsweek. And I thought - I always think of Newsweek
as what it used to be - sort of a gutsy magazine that had changed.
So anyway I get to Newsweek and the first week I'm there, some
stories about these phony chronologies are circulating and I call
a friend of mine on the National Security Council staff and I
say, "What are you doing now? You're doing false chronologies
on how the Iran sales happened?" and he said, "Bob,
you don't understand," he said "These were orders from
the Oval Office. Don Regan sent down word that we were to protect
the President and write him out of these events." And so,
I tell my new Bureau Chief at Newsweek Edwin Thomas, and he's
real excited by this 'cause he gets excited, and he goes in and
Tommy DeFrank, who was the assistant Bureau Chief, calls another
source - well known person whose name I can't mention I guess,
from the NSC, and this person said yes, that's exactly right,
we were told to do it.

So Newsweek ran this - I have one copy of this because Newsweek
sort of threw it away afterwards - but we ran a cover story called
"Cover-up" and we recount how, to protect the President,
the NSC staffers were ordered to put these phony chronologies
out. And what we didn't realize at the time was we had just broken
through the last firebreak. We were in the Oval Office with this
story.

And the reaction was incredible. Many of my colleagues in the
press attacked us. The Wall Street Journal, not just in its editorial
pages but its news columns attacked us; Newsweek - of course,
Don Regan, who was one of the people of course named here attacked
us; and Newsweek decided that they wanted to retract the story.
And they sent me back to my source, several times over the next
period of time, to get him to take it back and he wouldn't. He
said, I told you what I knew, and what do you want me to say,
and I said well, we want to retract the story is what we want
to do. Anyway, so one of my friends went around - because this
was such an embarrassment to Newsweek - that he told me he went
around Newsweek and got all the copies he could find and threw
them away, so people wouldn't know - so there wouldn't be a reminder
- it was sort of a 'nice thing' he was doing - so there wouldn't
be a reminder of my big mistake. And I found out fairly recently
- as recently as a year ago, Newsweek was going to Judge Walsh's
office and asking him to give them information so they could retract
this story - in their view - to fix the historical record. But
of course Judge Walsh wouldn't help them on it.

So anyway, here we are, and the problem is - and, uh, it's hard
to understand if you haven't lived in Washington it may not make
a lot of sense, but I'll explain it anyway - there were three
choices at this point:

Choice A was to tell the truth, to say that the President had
violated a variety of laws, committed felonies, and violated our
constitutional safeguards about the way we carry out wars in our
country, and impeach him. Option A.

Then there was Option B - to tell the truth and have congress
sort of say well, it's okay with us, which creates a dangerous
precedent for the future, that is, that now President's would
say well hey, look at the Reagan example, you know, if he can
wage war privately, why can't I? So that was Option B.

And then there was Option C - to pretend it didn't happen, or
to pretend that, say, some Lieutenant Colonel had done it all.
So Washington, I guess understandably, settled on Option C.

And it didn't hit me until one evening in March of '87, the Tower
board had just come out with its report, which basically said
that the President was a little bit asleep at the switch, but
hey, you know, it was really these crazy nuts who did it, and
we had one of these Newsweek dinners - they're fancy affairs -
and it was at the Bureau Chief's house, and they're catered, and
there's a tuxedoed waiter, and he pours the wine, there's nice
food, and I was new - I came out of AP which is kind of a working
class/working man's kind of news organization so I wasn't used
to this. And we had as our guest that evening Brent Scowcroft,
who had been on the Tower Board, and Dick Cheney, who was then
- who was going to be the ranking minority figure on the house
Iran-Contra Committee, and we're going through this little delightful
dinner, and at one point Brent Scowcroft says, he says "Well,
I probably shouldn't be saying this, but if I were advising Admirable
Poindexter, and he HAD told the President about the diversion,
I'd advise him to say that he hadn't." And being new to this
whole, sort of game, I stopped eating, and looked across the table
and said "General! You're not suggesting that the Admiral
should commit perjury, are you?" And there was kind of like
an embarrassed little silence at the table, and the editor of
Newsweek, who was sitting next to me, says - I HOPE partly jokingly
but I don't know - he says, "Sometimes we have to do what's
good for the country."

So that became - I somehow realized I was in a different place
than I thought I'd been in you know? So what happened then was
that played out. It played out. And it played out almost predictably,
almost sort of with a sadness. And even when Oliver North finally
told the truth, which was that he was ordered to do all this stuff,
and that there was a cover-up going on - you see, he even told
them there was a fall guy planned - it was the first cover-up
that had been announced probably in front of 100 million Americans
and still it was believed by Congress! So Lee Hamilton again,
the same guy who had accepted North's word and other guys' back
in August of '86, he decides, as Chairman of the Iran-Contra Committee,
that we all should sort of say that it was just these 'men of
zeal' - there'd been a coup d'etat in the White House, we'd find
out - there'd been a junta of a Lt. Col and maybe an Admiral
here and there you know who were running this policy and that
somehow the CIA had missed it, the White House had missed it,
NSA had missed it - it wasn't like the Russians were doing this,
it was like, being done, like, under their nose! But, you know,
okay - it's not very believable - a lot of Americans DIDN'T believe
it, to tell you the truth - but in Washington we believed it.
We all believed it. Not all of us, but we pretty much HAD to
believe it. And at Newsweek and elsewhere we were told in the
press this was not a story anymore, this was not to be pursued,
I guess because this wouldn't be good for the country to pursue
it. And again, history being kind of quirky, there was this other
element of the story, which was that these three Republican judges
who picked independent counsel, picked Lawrence Walsh to be the
independent counsel on this investigation, and Lawrence Walsh
was sort of this non-descript sort of fellow - he's not a really
sharp legal mind? But he's very honest - and maybe they thought
they could manage him. But he just kept pursuing the leads, and
despite all the lies and the cover-ups that went on, there were
other breaks because he kept pursuing the leads, that you then
had of course, with the North trial and the Poindexter trial,
these guys - basically North saying - here's more and more evidence
that these guys were running this thing, and then in the Poindexter
trial Reagan comes out and makes a complete fool of himself and
is just all over the place with his story.

But then another event happens that we really don't know much
about - and that event is that this guy named Craig Gillan is
hired to do a sort of clean-up operation at the Independent Counsel's
office - just to get the loose ends together so they can wrap
up the investigation and end this thing - it's 1990. And Craig
Gillan finds out that there are a lot of document requests that
had been sent out in the early days and some hadn't been answered!
One was from Charlie Hill, who was an aide to George Schultz,
and who was - last time I knew he was at Hoover up at Stanford
- and so they write to Charlie and they say Charlie - you didn't
give us your notes. And Charlie finally sends his notes, and
in it they find this strange reference to Casper Weinberger taking
all these notes! But of course Casper Weinberger told them that
he had no notes. Then as they follow those leads they find that
in fact there HAD been an Oval Office cover-up, and that what
we had seen, and what remarkably the White House had been able
to successfully maintain, in the defiance of all the logic and
reason that should have been brought to bear - they were able
to maintain for *six years* what amounted to a felony obstruction
of justice out of the White House. And they did it under the
nose of the Congress, under the nose of the Washington press corp,
and the way they were able to do it was essentially this acceptance
in Washington of an absolutely phony reality, one which is accepted
in sort of a consensus way - what you'll hear if you listen to
the McLaughlin Group or these other shows is a general consensus
- there may be disagreements on some points - but there is a general
consensus of the world that is brought to bear, and often it is
in absolute contradiction to the real world. It is a false reality
- it's a Washington reality.

And what we have seen at the end of these twelve years, and what
I guess the challenge of the moment becomes is how that gets changed.
How do the American people really get back control of this -
not just their government, but of their history - because it's
really their history that has been taken away from them. And
it's really what the Washington Press Corps and the Democrats
in Congress as well as the Republicans are culpable of, was this
failure to tell the American people their history. And the reason
they didn't was because they knew, or feared, that if the American
people knew their real history - whether it goes back to the days
of slaughters going on in El Salvador - if they had known about
El Mazote - if they had known about the little children that were
put in the house and shot to death and garroted - that they wouldn't
have gone along with that. And if they had known that there were
felony obstructions of justice being carried out of the Oval Office
they wouldn't have gone along with that either, and there would
have been a real problem - there would have been a political problem
to contain I guess, but - it is not the role of the Washington
press corp - maybe this is sounds like an understatement, but
it's not the role of the Washington press corps to take PART in
that. Our job was supposed to be, I thought, to kind of tell
people what we could find out! We go in, we act nice, we ask a
lot of questions, find some things and run out and TELL YA! We're
sort of like spies for the people, you know, and instead, we sort
of got in there - and I guess it was real nice, we felt like we
were insiders, we felt like these were all nice, respectable men
- they dressed well - Casper Weinberger went to every single one
of these press/government functions - the Grid Iron Club, the
White House Correspondents' dinners, the Congressional correspondents'
dinners - you'd always find Casper Weinberger there. And so when
he finally gets indicted the Washington press corps comes out
and says that's a terrible thing to do, 'cause Casper Weinberger's
a good man! He went to all our parties! How could you think badly
of him? And there was even a column by liberal columnist Richard
Cohen in the Washington Post who said, it's a terrible thing to
indict Casper Weinberger because we shop at the same store in
Georgetown! He said Casper Weinberger even pushed his own shopping
cart! And before Thanksgiving one year, Richard Cohen saw Casper
Weinberger buying his own turkey. And so how could you think
about indicting a guy for a felony obstruction of justice when
he pushes his own shopping cart? This may seem funny out here
but in Washington it's not! This is very serious stuff!

I know I'm taking too long, but one other thing I wanted to talk
about was - well, you know life being what it is, and history
being quirky as it is - so I left Newsweek in 1990 - I was not
on the best of terms with them - because I wouldn't go along with
this. I mean, I wouldn't - I kept saying first of all George
Bush knew it and we should have told the people about it in 1988
when he was running for president - we *knew* what he knew, we
knew that his stories were absolutely the most implausible, idiotic,
*embarrassing* cover stories imaginable and they should not have
been treated with the kind of respect they were treated with and
we should definitely have pursued that. We also knew that there
was a a cover-up going on - which I kept insisting on even though
Newsweek kept trying to retract it, and so I left. And I was
going to do this book, and this book was going to be about how
Washington sort of works or doesn't, and about how the press behaved
sort of cowardly, and then I get this phone call one day, in August
of 1990, from PBS Frontline, and they asked me if I would do some
investigative work on this project called the October Surprise.
And I'd been through a lot, and I really didn't want to go through
any more. And of all the taboos - obviously for a long time the
North network was just a 'crazy conspiracy theory', and then the
idea that Bush was involved was a 'crazy conspiracy theory', and
the idea that there was a cover-up was a 'crazy conspiracy theory',
and I'd seen all these conspiracy theories actually turn out to
be TRUE, so I really didn't want to discount ANYTHING without
having looked at it carefully, I thought, and anyway I thought
it would be kind of wimpy, you know, unprofessional and wimpy
to say no. This was a reputable outfit - PBS Frontline wanted
me to look at something and, as much as I had my doubts about
it I thought, okay.

So, I went off on this little strange adventure. I had a producer
named Robert Ross who's a wonderful guy who speaks Persian and
has lived in the Middle East. We took our little camera - our
little high eight camera - and we went around as cheaply as possible,
and we went to Europe, we went to the West Coast - we interviewed
some arms dealer over in Santa Monica - and we went around and
put together whatever we could. And we found, to our surprise
I think, that there was more there than we thought. We had doubts
about a lot of it still, and we did not in our - when we finally
decided to go with the program we wanted we were very I think
skeptical - that we didn't feel it was proven, but that there
was enough there that merited further attention, I guess that's
a fair way to say where we ended up. So we did this program,
and it aired in April of '91. Gary Sick the day before - Gary
Sick was interviewed on our show - he was a former national security
man under Carter and a very respected historian, and it was partly
his decision to think that this had happened that influenced us
to some degree, because it wasn't just crazy arms dealers and
intelligence guys - it was also this fairly respectable guy, and
the day before our show aired he did a piece in the New York Times
describing his angst and how he came to this conclusion. And
so this story that had sort of lived on the fringes for some time
but which the government itself had brought in on the public record
in a perjury trial in the Spring of 1990, and lost, this now moved
into the mainstream much more, and it drew - even by the comparisons
to the other stuff - this one WAS attacked, and continues to be
attacked. Frontline commissioned a second program - an update,
which we tried to do in just a very straightforward, honest way
- because at that point the debunkers - The New Republic and Newsweek
actually leading the way - we felt were wrong on a number of points.
But we also felt that we didn't think it was anywhere near proven
and we did a show saying basically that, and trying to track Casey's
whereabouts and all the rest of the stuff we did.

Anyway, so after the second show, there was this Congressional
investigation, which the Republicans fought, which George Bush
personally strategized to stop, and it was stopped in the Senate
with a filibuster, but the House approved an investigation - the
Senate did a little one in one of the subcommittees, and it just
has to be that Lee Hamilton was of course assigned to head the
investigation. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise - see, Lee
Hamilton was a very honorable man, in many ways, I think, except
he doesn't believe anyone else can lie, I guess. He was chairman
of the Middle East subcommittee when the Iran stuff was happening
- the Iran arms stuff and he missed it. He was then chairman
of the intelligence committee when North was going full board
- missed that. He was then rewarded by being made head of the
Iran-Contra investigation and he kind of missed THAT. And so,
because of his sterling record they made him head of the House
Task Force on the October Surprise! And of course then the House
Task Force found that it was just fantasy, and they put out their
report - and I must say I've read a lot of reports and I think
it's the worst one I've ever read - but it was well-received in
Washington but I'm going to tell you one little - I mean when
people talk about fantasy in Washington - there is this section
in this report, and this I think is emblematic of it, where the
House wants to put Casey somewhere, and they decide that on August
2nd, 1980, Bill Casey was on Long Island. And you look for why
they think that - this becomes important to the story and I'll
make it brief. When you look back at this, what they have is
that, on August 2nd, Richard Allen - who was then a foreign policy
advisor to candidate Reagan, wrote Casey's Long Island phone number
on the bottom of a sheet of paper. It was Bill Casey, 516, you
know, whatever, and there's no notation of a call or conversation,
and Allen when he testified he said I think I called the number,
he said, but I don't recall talking to Casey or even if the call
was answered. And there's no phone bill showing a call. So what
normally people would say, even my four year probably would say,
is that doesn't prove anything. That proves, like, zero! If someone
calls my number in 703 in Arlington hey, I'm not there! And it
doesn't matter that they call my number, or write it down. Yet
this becomes conclusive proof to the task force that Bill Casey
was on Long Island.

Now the reason that's important is because Bill Casey was really
at the Bohemian Grove in upstate California. And what WE had,
was - he actually purchased their annual play book on August 1st
at the Grove, according to the Grove. We had a contemporaneous
diary entry from one of the people at the Grove that was in the
same cottage Casey was in, Matthew McGowan, who describes meeting
with Casey THAT weekend, and they throw out that evidence, because
Richard Allen wrote Casey's phone number down and it was a Long
Island number! And you go to them and you say how - Larry Burcello
was the counsel here - I've had these arguments and I've said
Larry, this doesn't prove *anything*, and they say, it does as
far as we're concerned. They put Bill Casey - they wanted him
to be there actually the week earlier, the last week of July,
because if you put him there that weekend, which they do, that
disproves one of the allegations about him meeting with Iranians
in Spain that weekend. So by putting him there the weekend earlier,
when he was actually there the first weekend in August, you disprove
an important allegation, and that means that one of these guys
was just a liar and a fabricator, and we can all go home and feel
happy about it.

Anyway, that's a bit of a long way to explain that my last adventure
was on this October Surprise thing, and I have written a second
book, which recounts that little adventure, and it's called TRICK
OR TREASON, and it should be out, I guess later this year. This
first book is more - basically I talk about how the "conventional
wisdom" works, and I use that to sort string along a lot
of great little stories about how - my investigative stuff and
things that we found out along the way. The second book is really
like a first person kind of magical mystery tour through strange
people.

What I think is the bottom line of both books is that we are in
great danger of losing our grasp of reality as a nation. Our
history has been taken away from us in key ways. We've been lied
to so often. And important things have been blocked from us.
It WAS important to know that those little children were killed
in El Mazote. I have four kids, and I know what they mean to
me, and it's always been a part of my journalism that I don't
want - that if any of my sons will ever be taken off to war someplace,
I want it to be done for a real reason - not because somebody
made something up. But I also feel for people who lose their
kids anywhere. And I think that the idea that our government
would be complicit, not just in the killing, but in this very
cynical effort to lie about it, and hide about it, and pretend
it didn't happen, and attack those who find out that it did happen,
is in many ways almost worse. It is something that, as a democracy,
we can't really allow to happen.

The main problem, at this point, is that we have a set of establishments
in Washington that have failed us, as a people. Obviously the
executive branch did it because it had its goals, and agendas,
and it wanted to do these things, and maybe in some cases they
were right. But they shouldn't have lied to us. They shouldn't
have tried to create a false reality to trick us into this. Congress
failed because it didn't have the courage to stand up and do oversight
and perform its constitutional responsibilities.

But what is perhaps most shocking to Americans is that the press
failed. The press is what people sort of expect to be there as
the watchdog, the final group to sort of warn us of danger. And
the press joined it. And the press saw itself - in the Washington
press corp I'm talking about - saw itself at the elite levels
as part of the insider community. And as that evolved and then
grew in the 1980's, the press stopped performing its oversight
responsibilities. And I think we have to figure out some way,
as a people, to change that. There've been actually more changes
I think in the political structure - whatever anyone thinks of
Mr. Clinton, at least there's a change there. And he has different
priorities. And in Congress there's even been some change.

But the press has gone from being when I got there '77 as a Watergate
press corp, with its faults, with being maybe a little too overly
zealous in pursuing some minor infraction, but still - it was
there as the watchdog. What we have now, and its continuing into
this new era, is the Reagan-Bush press corp. It's the press corp
that they helped create - that they created partly by purging
those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going
along, but it was ultimately the editors and the news executives
that did the purging. It wasn't the White House or the State
Department or the Embassy in El Salvador that drove Ray Bonner
out of the New York Times; it was the New York Times executives
who did it. And throughout that whole era it wasn't the State
Department or the White House that ruined Paul Allen's career
at NPR, it was NPR executives. And this was the case all the
way around Washington. The people who succeeded and did well
were those who DIDN'T stand up, who DIDN'T write the big stories,
who looked the other way when history was happening in front of
them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with
the deception of the American people. And I think that's what
we all have to sort of look at to see what we can do to change
it. I think it will take a tremendous commitment by the American
people to insist on both more honest journalism, more straightforward
journalism, but also maybe even new journalism. There has to
be some other way - some other outlets. In a way, I've grown
to despair at the possibility of reforming some of these organizations.
Maybe it can happen, but I think ultimately, we're going to have
to see a new kind of media to replace this old one.

End of talk. There followed a question and answer session - one
of which was to the point of this newsgroup. He was asked for
his opinion on the Kennedy assassination.

Parry: He's asking what I might think about the assassination
of President Kennedy. And I guess my answer about that would
be I don't know. One of the great tragedies of losing our history
which is what's been happening throughout our lifetimes, has
been that, because of this sort of 'conventional wisdom' or 'conventional
reality' that exists, certain things are not explored. I guess
in '63 the conventional wisdom was of course that it was a lone
gun acting by himself - a crazy man. And so the Warren Commission,
like many other government investigations since, basically just
reinforced - ratified that belief. They may have been right -
I mean, I don't know. [Man interjects "there've been over
600 books on the subject written ] -I know! I've read some of
them. But - all I'm saying is that if investigations aren't done
properly within a certain period of time it's very hard to do
them. I had a friend who was at Time/LIFE during that period
and he was following up on the connections to New Orleans. But
Time/LIFE was so angry about anyone even THINKING that there might
be another part of this story, that he used to have to put down
different stories on his expense accounts - like if he would to
go to New Orleans to interview some of these guys that might have
information he'd have to say he was there for the Mardi Gras or
something. He couldn't say he was there for the assassination
of President Kennedy because he would have been considered some
kind of a nut!

And in answer to a question about maybe the people don't really
want to know the truth or take responsibility to pressure the
powers that be to tell the truth:

Parry: I think probably a lot of people don't want to know. I
agree with that. I think, because, it's hard to know. And I
would hear that a lot. That would be an argument that would be
used a great deal in the 80's after Iran-Contra was going along
- it would be that people were bored, they were tired, they didn't
want to hear about it anymore. My feeling though is that it was
the responsibility of the reporter to tell the people what he
could about important events as fairly and as completely as possible.
And it was less my responsibility to decide what they should
know or shouldn't know, or even wanted to know, but to make an
honest judgment about what was historically of importance and
tell them what I could. And even if it's 10% of the public that
wants to know, they deserve to know. I don't think you should
do polls to find out what people want to hear and then tell them
what they want to hear. I think to some degree the press needs
to inform the public about stuff that's important.

In answer to "do the people know they're being lied to":

Parry: Well basically, the American people I think, from the polls,
believe - first of all they WERE interested in Iran-Contra, much
more so than the press wanted to think. I remember once at Newsweek
a poll showed 1/3 of the people following the story closely, 1/3
following them a little bit, and a 1/3 of them not following them
at all, and they said - well, you see 2/3 of the people aren't
following them very much at all, so therefore, you know - there
were arguments that were kind of turned and twisted to make it
appear that the public didn't really want to know. I think the
public DID want to know. Ollie North's book was a bestseller
- a number have been bestsellers - that shows that they're interested.
Plus, I think, they have a tremendous distrust of how the government's
functioned and they want to know when they've been lied to. It
may not be that they care as much about all the details, but they
sure care if a man who is running for President has lied to them
in a major way, and expect the press to try to make a good-faith
effort to discover that, and not to sort of go along and say gee,
it would be too disruptive if people knew that.